In Jamie Hedlund’s blog, Six weeks in Contractual Compliance and Consumer Safeguards, he briefed the community on three department initiatives (facilitate community-wide consumer safeguard discussion; boost DNS abuse mitigation efforts; and enhance transparency around contractual compliance). In this blog, I want to provide you an update on the increased transparency initiative around compliance reporting.
Over the past several months we enhanced the ICANN Contractual Compliance Performance Reports in a variety of ways, including:
- Enhanced Monthly Reporting - we added information on the subject matter of complaints in the compliance monthly dashboard based on recommendations from the Competition, Consumer Choice, and Consumer Trust Review Team draft report and the Governmental Advisory Committee’s Copenhagen Communique. A few examples include:
- Report the WHOIS Inaccuracy complaint by three categories – syntax, operability, and identity.
- Report on the subject of registrar related Domain Name System (DNS) abuse complaints such as spam, pharming, phishing, malware, and botnets in addition to counterfeiting, pharmaceutical, fraudulent and deceptive practices, trademark or copyright infringement, and registrar abuse contact.
- New Quarterly Reports - our quarterly reports are intended to replace the metrics provided at the Annual General Meeting and the Community Forum during the Compliance Program Update session. This will bring a regular cadence to reporting and eliminate the nearly six-month gap due to the Policy Forum at which no reporting is provided.
- New Annual Reports – our new annual reports are intended to provide a calendar year view into the compliance landscape. A few examples include:
- Report the registrar and registry complaint types by legacy gTLDs and new gTLDs.
- Report the enforcement reasons for registrars and registries.
- Increased transparency around complaints in anticipation of future policy requests to measure the effectiveness of the new Transfer Policy. We added additional metrics on the subject matter of ICANN received complaints, which will be relevant for policy review and evaluation.
Additional work is underway to provide a greater detail of reporting on complaints related to safeguards and Public Interest Commitments. All current and past Contractual Compliance Performance Reports are available on ICANN.org
Thank you for your recommendations and requests to enhance transparency in contractual compliance. We welcome your feedback as we continue to improve our reporting. if you have any questions, please contact ICANN Contractual Compliance at compliance@icann.org.